Blog by James Millington, PhD

Tag: Web

This blog has been seriously neglected over the last six months, so there’s a lot of catching up to do here.

There’s lots of conferences and papers to list, but first I should highlight the slight difference in look of this blog and the entire website. I recently decided I was going to switch to Google sites to host www.landscapemodelling.net and move this blog from WordPress to Blogger (for multiple reasons I won’t go into here). The website is lacking many of the pages from its previous guise and the NetLogo models have been moved to openABM.org. I’m continuing to add the old (and maybe some new) content to the website but that’s likely to be a slow process (particularly given how long it’s taken me to get to write this post!). The link structure of the blog pages has changed – I think I’ve managed to change most links but there may still be some that are broken (if you find any please let me know). Many of the images are also currently missing – I’ll get to re-inserting those sometime…

I’ve managed to get to quite a few conferences this year in the US, UK and Germany.A particular highlight was getting to see my old PhD advisor George Perry in the US. George was on sabbatical at Harvard Forest and he invited me to the forest to give a seminar. It was also great to attend the 4th USFS FVS conference in Fort Collins, CO and to be one of the only four or so international attendees. There’s a list below of all the conference presentations I gave with links to the conference websites.

I’ve also been working hard to get a few papers published. The paper I’ve been working on with George and David O’Sullivan on the narrative properties of generative simulation models (i.e., agent-based models and the like) has now been accepted and is in press at Geoforum. Two papers I have been working on related to my work in Michigan have also been accepted, subject to corrections, by Ecological Modelling. The papers are closely linked, with one describing the northern hardwood forest gap regeneration model we developed and the second showing how that model can be used in the integrated model to examine trade-offs and synergies in managing for both timber and deer in the forests. The current (provisional) citations for the three papers are below. When all are available online and in print I’ll post again here with the abstracts and links to the full text (and likely tweet the links before I blog!)

If you look at my blog posts over the last few months you might notice they’ve been becoming a less frequent. It can take time to write a post, and time has been hard to come by recently. I don’t expect time to be any more readily available in the near future, so from now on I’ll be posting my latest observations and thoughts on Twitter. Twitter, you see, is quicker. But it’s also thinner, and so from time-to-time I’ll be back here on my blog to get deeper into certain ideas and issues (or if I simply need more than 140 characters). If you don’t like Twitter and don’t want to follow me, my two latest tweets will always be at the top of this blog.

Now, I know a blog post about tweeting that complains about insufficient time to post blogs might seem absurd, but hopefully in the longer term the tweets and the blogs will prove an economic way to separate my more wheaty thoughts and observations from the chaffier ones…

This week I discovered a new blog that looks worth following for anyone interested in human-environment interactions, sustainability, or CHANS. The Global Change blog intends to explore big questions about society and environmental change, such as:

How do personal choices and values play a role in this conversation?

What do the natural sciences have to say about the way our world is changing?

What do the social sciences and humanities have to say about the ways that the social and the cultural intersect with questions surrounding environment?

How can we address environmental and social challenges at the same time?

How is environmentalism changing in response to these pressures?

What’s the role of higher education in facilitating sustainability and environmental literacy?

I’ve just discovered Apture – it looks like a pretty cool tool for integrating media into websites and blogs like this one. I’ve just installed it and will be experimenting to see how well it works. When you see an icon like this or this , the link it accompanies should open some related content in an interactive Apture window (which you can reposition or enlarge as you please). Here’s an example:

Towards the end of last week the MSU Environmental Science and Public Policy Program held a networking event on Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS). These monthly events provide opportunities for networking around different environmental issues and last week was the turn of the area CSIS focuses on. The meeting reminded me of a couple of things I thought I would point out here.

First is the continued commitment that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is making to funding CHANS research. The third week in November will be the annual deadline for research proposals, so watch out for (particularly) tired looking professors around that time of year.

Second, I realized I haven’t highlighted on this blog one of the NSF CHANS projects currently underway at CSIS. CHANS-Net aims to develop an international network of research on CHANS to facilitate communication and collaboration among members of the CHANS research community. Central to the project is the establishment of an online meeting place for research collaboration. An early version of the website is currently in place but improvements are in the planning. I was asked for a few suggestions earlier this week and it made me realise how interested I am in the potential of the technologies that have arrived with web 2.0 (I suppose that interest is also clear right here in front of you on this blog). I hope to be able to continue to make suggestions and participate in the development of the site from afar (there’s too much to be doing elsewhere to get my hands really dirty on that project). Currently, only Principle Investigators (PIs) and Co-PIs on NSF funded CHANS projects are members of the network, but hopefully opportunities for wider participation will be available in the future. In that event, I’ll post again here.

During the second half of the course I’m teaching at MSU this semester (FW852 Systems Modeling and Simulation) I’ve invited several colleagues to give guest lectures on the modelling work they do. These lecture serve as examples to the students of modeling and simulation in practice, and provide the opportunity to tap the brains of experts in different fields.

One of the speakers I invited was one of my former PhD advisors, Dr. George Perry. George is at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Rather than pay for him to fly half way around the world we thought we would save some CO2 (and money!) by doing the lecture via internet video conference. As you can see from the photo below we had a video feed from George up on a large screen (you can also see the video feed he had of our room down in the lower right of his screen) with his presentation projected onto a separate screen (at right).

George spoke about research he has done modelling habitat dynamics and fish population persistence in intermittent lowland streams in SE Australia [I’ll link here to his forthcoming paper on this work soon]. The emphasis was on the ecology of the system and how modeling combined with fieldwork can aid understanding and restoration of systems like this.

Everything went pretty well with only a couple of Max Headroom-type stutters (the stutters were purely technical – George’s presentation and material was much more coherent than the 80’s icon!). With the increasing availability of (free) technologies like this (I often use Skype to make video calls with my folks back home, and Google just released their new Voice and Video Chat) no doubt this sort of communication is here to stay. And it looks unlikely that eLectures will stop here. As highlighted this week, academic conferences and lectures in virtual environments like Second Life are beginning to catch on too.

Apparently blogging is just soooo 2004 and we should just leave it to the pros. The blog you’re reading may not be dead, but has been anaemic of late. Although this may not be the place to catch breaking news and cutting edge analysis in the 24-hour current affairs news cycle, it is a place where I can highlight some of my recent thoughts and activities. Maybe others will benefit from these notes, maybe they won’t. But in writing things down for public view it forces me to refine my thoughts so that I can express them concisely. Hopefully this blog has some life it yet and I will try to write soon about what has been taking up all my spare time recently – QuadTrees, seed dispersal and fire.

For now I will just let you know that the paper describing the agent-based model of Mediterranean agricultural Land-Use/Cover Change that I began developing as part of my PhD studies has now officially been published in the latest issue of JASSS.